


Five Times Jane Ross Found Love (And One Time She Kept It)

by Fire_Sign



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 08:01:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7161527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fire_Sign/pseuds/Fire_Sign
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The happiest of (early) birthdays to you TheHonorableMrsMcCarthy!</p>
<p>This was meant to be a Jane exploring her sexuality fic and ended up somewhere slightly different. Ivy Robinson, for those who aren't keeping a large spreadsheet of original characters, makes an appearance or two in the Squirrel-universe stories. It's not terribly important though; this is mostly a story about Jane and her various romances.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Five Times Jane Ross Found Love (And One Time She Kept It)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercurialBianca_TheHonorableMrsMcCarthy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercurialBianca_TheHonorableMrsMcCarthy/gifts).



> The happiest of (early) birthdays to you TheHonorableMrsMcCarthy!
> 
> This was meant to be a Jane exploring her sexuality fic and ended up somewhere slightly different. Ivy Robinson, for those who aren't keeping a large spreadsheet of original characters, makes an appearance or two in the Squirrel-universe stories. It's not terribly important though; this is mostly a story about Jane and her various romances.

**Adam Bishop - October 1927**

 

Adam is a boy at the home where Welfare has placed Jane, just outside the city proper. He’s a year older, with a shock of bright red hair and membership to one of the low-level gangs that makes him the most powerful kid in the group. He’s bright; he tries to hide it with rough speech, but Jane finds him reading by the light of the moon one night.

When he looks up, he smiles before he scowls and Jane is not entirely certain she finds the idea of boys revolting any longer. She blushes, mutters an apology. If this is what it’s like to turn thirteen, this funny little flutter in the pit of your stomach and the deep embarrassment at getting caught, she’d rather have nothing to do with it.

“I’m looking for a way out,” she whispers. “For me and my friend, Ruth.”

He slides the book beneath the cushion and flashes her a conspiratorial grin.

“Brave girl. Where’s your friend?”

Ruth is still in bed, scared to get caught.

“Looking elsewhere,” Jane says.

“Go find her,” he says. “It’s not a bad place here, not once you figure it out. But I’ll show you the way out.”

So Jane retrieves Ruth and their few precious belongings, and return to the room where Adam had sat. She doesn’t see him at first, then she hears a hiss; she turns and finds him looking up from beneath a loose floorboard--the house is elevated and there's a crawlspace beneath.

“This is the quickest way,” he says. You’ll come right out to the garden.”

He hoists himself out of the ground; on an impulse, Jane leans in to kiss his cheek in gratitude. Then, blushing furiously, she makes her escape with Ruth behind.

 

* * *

 

**Magali Allard - April 1929**

 

Magali is the daughter of one of Jane’s hosts in Paris, different to Jane in every way: short when Jane is tall, curved where Jane is flat, dark haired, dark eyed, darkly olive skinned. Everything that is not in fashion, and yet Jane watches her with avid eyes as she strolls through Paris with the sort of confidence even Miss Phryne was bound to envy.

Her laugh is high and bubbly, her whispers in the night between their beds low. She is a friend, Jane assures herself, and ignores her urge to kiss the girl just to see if she tastes of the peppermints she always ate.

It’s a temptation she resists until they go to the country for the weekend, and they find themselves sitting by the edge of a pond and laughing. Jane’s French has improved, and Magali’s English, and between the two of them there was very little that they cannot say. Except, of course, the request to kiss. There are no words in English or French that quite encapsulate Jane’s tentative urges. She knows, intellectually, that it is a thing that happens, but not, perhaps, to girls like her.

(She tells this to Mac months later, when she’s returned to Melbourne, and Mac laughs and points out that she sounded more nervous about the kissing than the partner.)

Eventually Magali leans forward, tucks Jane’s hair back into the braid, and kisses her softly. She does taste of peppermints, mingled the tobacco of her mother’s cigarettes, and Jane commits the taste to memory.

Her ship leaves Marseilles for Melbourne a week later; Jane stands at the rail, waving to Magali with a smile, and eats a peppermint.

 

* * *

**Thomas Grey - January 1932**

 

She meets Thos at a party, the older brother of a friend. He’s tall and blonde and enormous. He reminds Jane a little of Samson from the circus, she realises, that same aura of gentleness that had made her so open to Miss Phryne’s unusual visitor. It’s why she doesn’t object when he kisses her, and kisses her so well that her entire body buzzes with the pleasure. They step out a few times; once to the foreshore, once to Luna Park where they find an amusement to hide behind for some heavy petting. It doesn’t go further that night, though she wishes it would; “Not here, lovely,” he whispers against her ear, and she bites her lip to keep from whimpering.

It’s glorious. His hands and his mouth, and finally, one afternoon shortly after her eighteenth birthday, the loss of her virginity. It is everything and nothing like she was told to expect, between Miss Phryne and girls at school, but it is good. He’s thoughtful and slow, so careful that by the end she grips his hair to urge him closer and faster.

“I won’t break,” she promises, urging his hand into a better position.

When it is over, she laughs for the sheer delight. And while they only step out a handful more times--they have very little in common, they discover--she always remembers him fondly. She even goes to see him off when he moves to Sydney, pushing a book for the journey into his hand and then waving as the train pulls away.

 

* * *

**Ivy Robinson - January 1933**

 

She meets Jack’s niece over a family dinner; she looks quite a bit like her uncle at first glance, which Jane finds terribly disconcerting. But she soon notices the differences: her eyes are brown instead of blue, her mannerisms are different in subtle ways, her ears are much more fortunate for a young woman than Jack’s would be. They hit if off immediately; there’s a few years between them, but Jane’s travels give her an advantage, and really what are a few years anyway? They are good friends.

(On occasion, though not often, Jane wonders if her lips are as soft as they look.)

When Jane decides to go to university in Melbourne--she considers both Sydney and Adelaide, but she can’t bear to be that far away from her mother and her family for that long for that many years--Jack offers her the second bedroom in his flat, and Jane and Ivy accept with pleasure.

The proximity is a mixed blessing. Because once Jane kisses her--it was meant to be a chaste kiss on the cheek, and it most adamantly was _not_ \--they rarely stop. It lasts for two years, fumbling and laughing and sharing books and deepest secrets and some frankly mind-blowing sex, once they work out the prerequisite parts, and they are both happy. But Ivy’s mother and stepfather are not, perhaps, as open minded as Jane’s family and it begins to wear.

“Janet…” Ivy says one night, as she prepares to leave the flat to visit her ill mother, and Jane _knows_. She doesn’t even reprimand Ivy for the nickname. It’s too much, the secrecy and the questions about when Ivy will settle down, and Ivy’s desperate desire to have children.

“Kindred spirits,” she says, smiling at Ivy’s huff of laughter at the reference, “come in so many forms.”

“So long as I have mine in you,” Ivy replies.”No matter how it comes.”

“I am not so easily lost as that,” Jane replies, embracing her.

She only cries as little as Ivy walks out the door.

 

* * *

**Will Baty - 1939**

 

Will is short, wiry, and remarkably persistent. Not at all Jane’s usual sort, and she knows Phryne dislikes him immensely. But her usual sort never seem to last--other than Ivy, who is still her closest friend, Jane hadn’t had a relationship for more than six months. Perhaps she was too fickle, or too doubting. Perhaps she just did not provoke those depths of feelings in others. Whatever it is, Will’s persistence is a welcome change.

At least, it is until September and the outbreak of war.

“I could be a hero,” he says the night after it is announced.

Jane has spent all day comforting Ivy--Baby Gilbert isn’t even a year old and Ivy’s husband has already decided to enlist and will not be deterred--and assuring Anthony and the Collins children that the war is far away. She saw the dark cloud that had settled over both Phryne and Jack as they tried to ascertain what could and could not be done, and remembered the bits and pieces she had learnt of their time at war. She has no patience for heroes.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Will,” she says.

He does not listen. A week later he is at her front door, ring in hand.

“Marry me before I go,” he says.

Jane shakes her head.

“I won’t be part of this, Will,” she says, wondering if she is ruining her only chance at commitment. But her first duty is to be loyal to her own needs, and she knows that accepting his proposal will not bring her happiness. Not if he comes back unchanged, and certainly not with the unknowns before them. “I’m sorry, but no.”

He closes the ring box and turns. She expects him to turn back at the stairs, try again; her heart is in her throat as she watches him.

He doesn’t even pause.

 

* * *

**Ivy Myers (née Robinson) - July 1940**

 

The notifications come in the form of telegrams, so when Ivy calls her with the news that one has just been delivered, Jane tells her to stay put and she would be over immediately.  She packs several outfits,  the books she’ll need for the article she’s working on--she’s not sure when she’ll be home again--and makes the journey halfway across Melbourne in a time that would make Phryne proud.

Ivy is in tears when she opens the door. Gilbert is on the floor of the parlour, stacking blocks. Jane leads Ivy to the armchair, makes tea, holds the envelope carefully.

“Perhaps it is…”

Jane is unsure what news could be better than the one they expect. Captured, perhaps, or injured. But somehow they both know it is not. It is the news Ivy’s own mother faced twenty-five years earlier.

“No,” Ivy says. “No. I know--I _know_.”

Ivy opens the envelope, passes the telegram to Jane without reading it. Killed in action.

“Ivy--”

The woman collapses; Jane can do nothing but hold her as she sobs.

“What am I to do, Janet?” she asks

Jane strokes her hair, cups her face.

“You lean on your family, and you raise your son, and you make it through somehow.”

Ivy’s hands open and close in a quick staccato.

“Will you stay?” she finally manages; her eyes are pleading, and none of it is simple.

But Jane knows. She presses a chaste kiss to Ivy’s cheek--there will be time for more later, touches given in comfort and lust and playfulness all--and nods.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

And she never does.


End file.
